A Set Of Zen Yoga Poses Are At The Center Of This Million-Dollar Legal Battle

Chloe Schildhause is a journalist based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Bold Italic, Nylon Magazine and Dazed & Confused. She is currently creating her own magazine focused on fashion, food, goths and cholas.

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Inside a quaint studio in the East Village a flock of yogis stretch mat-to-mat for a invigorating and sweaty hour-long vinyasa yoga class.

It’s free of charge and set to a soundtrack that ranges from the Talking Heads to Suicide to Miley Cyrus.

By the end of class the yogis rest peacefully in corpse pose as their instructor goes through the routine spiel of after class announcements: “If you rented a mat please hang it on the ballet bars. We are a donation based studio, so please leave whatever you can in the tissue box by the door. And also, we are being sued by Bikram Choudhury.”

According to Bikram’s lawyer, Robert Gilcrest (who in addition to being his lawyer is also a Bikram yogi with a wife who owns a Bikram yoga studio), Bikram obtained a copyright in 2003 that protects his sequence and that YTTP owner Greg Gumucio is “misusing without approval.”

The lawsuit states that the title of Gumucio’s class, “Traditional Hot Yoga” is deceptively named “in order to conceal the fact that the class incorporates and infringes upon, among other things, Bikram’s copyrighted Asana Sequence and Dialogue.”

The sequence was developed by Choudhury in the 1970s, and is a regimented routine with a slew of rules such as never diverging from the Bikram dialogue, always teaching on carpet in a room set to 105 degrees, and never offering a derivative of the class without being a Bikram accredited studio.

YTTP’s “Traditional Hot Yoga” classes are offered in four studios - three in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn. In addition to these classes, YTTP also offers vinyasa classes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Seattle.

They have reached a popularity that goes beyond their donation-based allure. Even celebrities like Mary-Kate Olsen have been spotted getting down with the people.

Gumucio, who was trained by Bikram in 1996, opened the first midtown location for “Traditional Hot Yoga” in 2009 and admits that the classes are a mirror image of the sequence developed by Bikram. One can expect the same twenty-six postures - repeated twice and two breathing exercises in a steaming hot room.

“Most of the people who come to our [traditional hot yoga] classes haven’t done Bikram before,” Greg said. “We are expanding it to a group that wasn’t able to experience it before.”

The average cost of a drop-in class at an accredited Bikram studio is $20. At YTTP a Traditional Hot Yoga Class is $8, which aligns with Gumucio’s ethos of making yoga more accessible to the everyone.

Bikram, a multi-millionaire with a fleet of over 600 Bikram studios, is obviously not happy about the added business competition and neither are some Bikram studio owners. Raffael Pacitti, founder of Manhattan Bikram Yoga, closed his midtown location in 2010. He wrote a letter to his students explaining how, “Mr. Gumucio and his team have taken it upon themselves to violate this honorable and ancient system in the interest of commerce and making money.”

“This kind of activity is insulting to the Bikram community,” Raffael said in regards to Greg’s studio near his mid-town location. Raffael, who was trained by Greg, said he has great regard for him, “but why is he not calling it Bikram yoga?” he asks. “[Practitioners] leave thinking it’s the work of Greg Gumucio, which is disrespectful to Bikram...if he had it approved by Bikram, with his blessing, then I would have stepped aside graciously. I probably would have asked him for a job.”

Gumucio said, “I paid to go to [Bikram’s] training.” - which in 1996 cost $7,000. Now it can add up to $10,000. “What blessing do I need? I don’t need his blessing.”

And according to the Copyright Office that may very well be the case. Copyright protects performances and expression, but does not protect activities that are functional, such as exercise routines. Turns out activities like yoga and kickboxing and pole dancing can be taught by anyone.

Entertainment litigator Jordan Susman wrote that because “[Bikram chose] to narrowly define his yoga as a system that primarily (if not solely) exists to promote health, Bikram made his yoga subject to little or no copyright protection.”

Bikram’s first copyright was in 1978 for his book ‘Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class.’ In 2003 he received an amendment to this original copyright that included a copyright for his video. William Paltry, author of Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, wrote: “sometime in this new century, Bikram concluded, somehow, that he not only had a copyright in his selection of the 26 positions, but that this selection gave him the exclusive right to stop others from performing them in that order. That's baloney”

This isn’t the first time Bikram has been involved in a lawsuit. In 2002 Bikram sued yoga studio owners Kim and Mark Morrison, who own a studio in Costa Mesa, Calif.

The lawsuit was settled. Bikram then warned Open Source Yoga Unity, a group of yoga instructors with the mission to keep the tradition of yoga in the public domain, that he was going to sue. But before he did, OSYU sued Bikram for declaratory judgment to ensure that yoga would not be considered intellectual property, but an ancient practice available to all. This suit was settled as well.

In response to the current lawsuit, Gumcio has created a petition at Yogatruth.org, asking all those who believe that yoga should not be owned, to sign. It has gathered over 8,500 signatures.

Many students have been asking Gumucio why he doesn’t just change a few of the postures so that Bikram will leave him alone. But he is keeping the routine out of principle and is even considering having his own hot yoga training, in addition to the vinyasa training YTTP already offers.

“I paid to teach this. I have the right to teach this,” Gumucio said. “Bikram has, pardon the saying, a Machiavellian approach. It’s so not in the spirit of yoga...instead of being the control freak that he is, he could be ten times bigger. He’s succeeding in spite of himself.”